What podcasters can learn from the 'Caliphate' controversy
A hoax charge, a was-he-wasn't-he (a member of ISIS) mystery, and what it means for audio journalists and podcasters
Trigger Warning: The first paragraph describes graphic details about death.
Dear Reader,
By now, you’ve probably heard about the renewed interest and controversy about the New York Times’ 2018 Peabody-winning and Pultizer finalist podcast, Caliphate. The ten-part series features Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi — who covers ISIS and Al-Qaeda (the terrorism beat, broadly speaking) for the paper — and her interactions with a young Canadian man who claims to have been a member of the Islamic State in Syria. Flying over to Canada to meet the young man, she and her producer interview the protagonist who talks about travelling to Syria via Pakistan and Turkey and becoming a member of ISIS. In the podcast, he goes into graphic detail about two killings that he is instructed to do, describing how he stabs someone to death, the still-warm blood of the victim’s blood splaying everywhere.
The cover art for Caliphate. Source: NYT
This last part is where it gets a bit murky. In the sixth episode of the podcast, after building up a tight narrative that is almost exclusively driven by this young man’s account, Callimachi tells listeners that there is a problem with his story: his passport stamps just don’t add up with the timeline he’s given them. And to top it all off, he’s not taking her calls anymore. By this time, Huzaifa has already admitted to two Canadian outlets that he, in fact, did not kill anyone, even though he did join ISIS. No mention of this is made in the podcast either.
Two years later, the story has emerged as a heavy point of discussion, thanks to Canadian law enforcement filing ‘hoax’ charges against this young man, alleging that he made up a big chunk of his claims. It’s not clear how far these claims extend — whether, if he did make up the story, he made up parts of it, or all of it. And it’s a big task for Canadian officials to successfully charge him.
But the thing is, Canadian media outlets were talking about the discrepancies in the young man’s story well before the Caliphate controversy blew up last month. Maybe we just weren’t paying enough attention to their analysis and scrutiny.
After initially defending the podcast and pointing out that it never claimed that the story was verified, Times recently has announced that it will conduct an internal review, and edit it to conform to higher journalistic standards, if necessary. This article from Ben Smith at the New York Times paints a (somewhat gossipy) picture of the broader context behind the scandal, and a big part of it talks about Rukmini Callimachi’s journalistic methods and the fact that colleagues of hers in the newsroom have, in the past, pointed out that some of her methods were questionable. And, it also shows that decision makers at the highest level of the newspaper’s editorial team had condoned, if not actively encouraged, her.
Some staff members at the Times had pointed out that there were problems with the podcast even before it had been published. There are lots of really great analytical articles which talk about a number of issues that this incident has raised, but I want to look at this from an audio and podcast perspective. My thoughts on this are still developing, even though I’ve gone down a rabbit-hole of articles, conversations and podcasts in the past few days.
But first, here’s a rough snapshot of events:
2014: By his own admission, a young Canadian man of Pakistani heritage, who goes by the name ‘Abu Huzaifah’, allegedly travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State. Months later, he says that he fled, disillusioned by the violent tactics of the group.
2016: Soon after he returns home to Canada (he says that he went to Pakistan to join his extended family, right after leaving Syria via Turkey), New York Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi establishes contact with him. She finds him on social media platforms and reaches out to him. He responds, and she asks whether she can come and interview him. She later tells CBC news that she meets him at least three times, and that this is the time in which he thinks he might ‘have slipped through the cracks’ because Canadian authorities have not come after him (insinuating that he maybe thought he wouldn’t get caught). But just hours later, Canadian intelligence authorities show up to question him. In the podcast, Callimachi wonders how they discovered Huzaifa’s connections to ISIS, and questions whether her phone is being tapped.
September 2017: Abu-Huzaifa gives an anonymous interview to CBC where he denies killing anyone, instead claiming that he had witnessed unimaginable violence. He later says that he was so close to the violence that he couldn’t talk objectively about it.
2018: The Times releases Caliphate, a podcast which draws from these interviews with the young man, chronicling his time in Syria. He talks about his decision to join ISIS, and describes his time spent as a policeman for them. He says that he had to stab a man in the heart at the order of ISIS officials. The Times doesn’t go into detail about the fact that, by the time the podcast was released, they knew that Huzaifa had told a very different story to CBC. Instead, the sixth episode of the podcast talks about the fact-checking that went into the story to determine whether or not his story is true. At no point does Callimachi say, “I believe everything”, but she says that the ‘scaffolding’ is there and that his claims line up with what she’s generally heard from other interviewees.
This episode has fuelled a larger conversation: about the ‘minimal skepticism’ expressed by the host in the first five episodes; confirmation bias and ‘parachuting’ journalism where foreign correspondents who don’t speak the local language rely on fixers; building an entire podcast series (hours of listening time in total) based on unconfirmed evidence; about Callimachi’s journalistic methods in general (especially the time when she and The Times took volumes of ISIS material out of the country, and the Iraqi government complained about it); the fetishistic portrayal of Islamic fundamentalism and a damning indictment by the late-journalist James Foley’s brother about the way Callimachi and by default, The Times pressured his family into giving an interview.
To be fair, some of it — especially Twitter comments — feels like schadenfreude, the glee that some of us might experience when we witness someone else’s suffering or fall from grace. And this story has some of the perfect ingredients for such a story — a star reporter whose social media posts about travelling through treacherous regions has a high virality co-efficient, a legacy media institution, disgruntled (or just plain concerned) colleagues whose criticism might be construed as jealousy.
But, I wonder whether there is a larger lesson for us audiophiles in this story. If you listened to the first six episodes of Caliphate (which form the bulk of the story about Abu Huzaifa), you’ve spent three hours of your life listening to a young man tell us about how killed someone, without knowing fully well whether he’s telling the truth. I wonder, would The New York Times have allowed a comparably-sized print or online story to go up without doing more fact-checking? I recently listened to the show again, and I realize that the narrative arc of the podcast depends so much on Abu Huzaifa’s story. Yes, there are tidbits of background information that Callimachi provides us with — about internet chatrooms and the radicalisation of ISIS members, but it largely dwells on this ‘narrative tension’ (Callimachi’s own words). There is a palpable sense of glee in her voice when she talks about the fact that she may have actually found someone who was a part of ISIS. She herself admits that of dozens of former ISIS members that she’s interviewed, she’s quoted just a handful of them on the record because of rigorous verification processes. But how then, did Huzaifa not just make it past these standards, but also in such a big way?
And yes, as listeners, we knew that there was a possibility that this story wasn’t confirmed. But could this story have passed the verification gatekeepers if it wasn’t audio? And if it had, would it have received so much real estate? Could it have sustained itself on the input of one unconfirmed source for the print equivalent of five episodes?
It’s hard to talk about counterfactuals here, but think of it this way. A print story wouldn’t have been padded as much with information about how the journalist got to the story. The inverted pyramid structure (or even more long-form articles) wouldn’t really allow for that. Most of the first episode is dedicated to setting up the story: Rukmini covering ISIS, receiving a warning from the FBI that she might be in danger, calling 911 when someone’s at her door, only to discover that it’s a maintenance worker, talking about being fat-shamed by ISIS…
For a grad school assignment that I did earlier this year, I compared the print story and the podcast version of the New York Times story about the ‘Jungle Prince of Delhi’ by Ellen Barry, and while both versions drew from the journalist’s reflections and placed the journalist as a central character, the podcast gave her more space to position herself as a character who was close to other characters. And that’s a feature of podcasts. This is an excerpt from my paper.
(Academic sources below)
But I think this ability to become a bigger part of the story comes with a greater sense of responsibility. Knowing everything that we do now — especially about how much resistance there was within the Times to the way in which this story was told — perhaps there should have been more scrutiny and caution. Perhaps the disclaimer about the verification should have been more explicitly stated at the beginning, instead of in the sixth episode, by which time readers had already become invested in the narrative.
There’s a risk when we don’t take this responsibility seriously, and I don’t think this issue is about Callimachi as an individual, and I hope that all criticisms levelled against her are fair and respectful. The risk is larger than a singular journalist. Here’s an excerpt from a piece written by Jacob Silverman for The New Republic:
Ultimately, it’s up to Canadian law enforcement to determine whether the young man perpetrated a hoax or not. And both outcomes seem possible: that he did actually kill people but later recanted his story due to fear of retribution, or he made up the story because, well… he is prone to exaggeration and hyperbole. This won’t be an easy task, since the RCMP is dealing with a potential crime scene in what used to be ISIS-controlled territory, where they don’t have jurisdiction, and where they don’t even know the name of the victim(s). It really is like finding a needle in a haystack.
This incident and the renewed discussion about the podcast will undoubtedly create more dialogue about fact-checking in audio-journalism and podcasting, a medium which many mainstream news outlets have been prolifically engaging with. And that’s a good thing.
And for people like us who care about podcasting, perhaps this can enable more introspection about how we should think about the stories we tell, how we take the listener on our journey, and what kinds of information we base our narratives on.
Until next time,
Sindhu
Academic sources:
Lindgren, M. (2016). Personal narrative journalism and podcasting. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 14(1), 23-41.
McCracken, E. (2017). The Serial Commodity: Rhetoric, Recombination and Indeterminacy in the Digital Age. In E. McCracken (Ed.) The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age (pp. 54-71). Routledge.
McHugh, S. (2014). Audio storytelling: Unlocking the power of audio to inform, empower and connect. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 24(2), 141-156.